It's a blog

Tag: Wikidata
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It’s been 9 months since my last Wikidata map update and once again we have many new noticable areas appearing, including Norway, South Africa, Peru and New Zealand to name but a few. As with the last map generation post I once again created a diff image so that the areas of change are easily identifiable comparing the data from July 2017 with that from my last post on October 2016.

A group of 7 developers worked on the app over a few days and as well as meeting each other and learning from each other they also managed to work on various improvements which I have summarised below.

2 factor authentication (nearly)

Work has been done towards allowing 2fa logins to the app.

Lots of the login & authentication code has been refactored and the app now uses the clientlogin API module provided by Mediawiki instead of the older login module.

When building to debug the 2fa input box will appear if you have 2fa login enabled, however the current production build will not show this box and simply display a message saying that 2fa is not currently supported. This is due to a small amount of session handling work that the app still needs.

Better menu & Logout

As development on the app was fairly non existent between mid 2013 and 2016 the UI generally fell behind. This is visible in forms, buttons as well as app layout.

One significant push was made to drop the old style ‘burger’ menu from the top right of the app and replace it with a new slide out menu draw including a feature image and icons for menu items.

Uploaded images display limit

Some users have run into issues with the number of upload contributions that the app loads by default in the contributions activity. The default has always been 500 and this can cause memory exhaustion / OOM and a crash on some memory limited phones.

In an attempt to fix and generally speed up the app a recent upload limit has been added to the settings which will limit the number images and image details that are displayed, however the app will still fetch and store more than this on the device.

Nearby places enhancements

The nearby places enhancements probably account for the largest portion of development time at the pre hackathon. The app has always had a list of nearby places that don’t have images on commons but now the app also has a map!

The map is powered by the mapbox SDK and the current beta uses the mapbox tiles however part of the plan for the Vienna hackathon is to switch this to using the wikimedia hosted map tiles at https://maps.wikimedia.org.

The map also contains clickable pins that provide a small pop up pulling information from Wikidata including the label and description of the item as well as providing two buttons to get directions to the place or read the Wikipedia article.

Image info coordinates & image date

Extra information has also been added to the image details view and the image date and coordinates of the image can now be seen in the app.

Summary of hackathon activity

The contributions and authors that worked on the app during the pre hackathon can be found on Github at the following link.

Roughly 66 commits were made between the 11th and 19th of May 2017 by 9 contributors.

Back in 2013 maps were generated almost daily to track the immediate usage of the then new coordinate location within the project. An animation was then created by Denny & Lydia showing the amazing growth which can be seen on commons here. Recently we found the original images used to make this animation starting in June 2013 and extending to September 2013, and to celebrate the fourth birthday of Wikidata we decided to make a few new animations.

I originally posted about the Wikidata maps back in early 2015 and have followed up with a few posts since looking at interesting developments. This is another one of those posts covering the changes since the last post, so late 2015, to now, May 2016.

The new maps look very similar to the naked eye and the new ‘big’ map can be seen below.

So while at the 2016 Wikimedia Hackathon in Jerusalem I teamed up with @valhallasw to generate some diffs of these maps, in a slightly more programatic way to my posts following up the 2015 Wikimania!

Wikidata is a multilingual project, but due to the size of the project it is hard to get a view on the usage of languages.

For some time now the Wikidata dashboards have existed on the Wikimedia grafana install. These dashboards contain data about the language content of the data model by looking at terms (labels, descriptions and aliases) as well as data about the language distribution of the active community.

On the 28th of January 2016 all Wikimedia MediaWiki APIs had 2 short outages. The outage is documented on Wikitech here.

The outage didn’t have much of an impact on most projects hosted by Wikimedia. However due to most Wikidata editing happening through the API, even when using the UI, the project basically stopped for roughly 30 minutes.

Interestingly there is an unusual increase in the edit rate 30 minutes after recovery.

Wikidata provides free and open access to entities representing real world concepts. Of course Wikidata is not meant to contain every kind of data, for example beer reviews or product reviews would probably never make it into Wikidata items. However creating an app that is powered by Wikidata & Wikibase to contain beer reviews should be rather easy.

Recently some articles appeared on the English Wikipedia Signpost about Wikidata (1, 2, 3). Reading these articles, especially the second and third, pushed me to try to make a dent in the ‘problem’ of references on Wikidata. It turns out that this is actually not that hard!